Al Gore’s 30-plus years of climate errors

Editorial note: This retrospective on the career of former U.S. Vice President and anti-energy advocate Al Gore first appeared in the January 2023 issue of Capital Research magazine.

***

In the summer of 1992, an otherwise formulaic U.S. senator of average impact and influence published Earth in the Balance, a climate policy book that landed on the best seller list. The book helped land its author, U.S. Sen. Al Gore Jr. (D-TN), the veep spot on Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential ticket.

Just try to name another vice president who didn’t become president, yet kept his name on the front page? After his inauguration as vice president in January 1993, Gore began what is now a 30-year run as an influential cultural lighting rod. Prior to that, the son of former U.S. Sen. Al Gore Sr. (D-TN) had done little more than literally inherit the name of the family business.

In 1976, Al Jr. won a seat from Tennessee in the U.S. House. In 1984, during an open race with no incumbent for one of Tennessee’s U.S. Senate seats, no other Democrat even bothered to challenge the “Al Gore” name for the nomination. Gore went on to win easily in the general election.

By Christmas 1986, Gore the Elder was whispering into the ear of Al the Younger, telling him he would win the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. The son listened and got in the race.

Up through 1988, Gore had already spent most of his dozen years in DC trying to make climate policy a big issue for the nation and a political winner for himself. It didn’t catch on. During his 1988 presidential campaign, Gore was better known for holding hearings in support of his then-wife Tipper’s prudish and politically awkward crusade against dirty words in rock music lyrics.

Gore was still sufficiently unremarkable prior to his presidential run that authors of a January 1988 profile in the New York Times still felt the need to physically describe him to readers: “Mr. Gore is solidly built, dark and indisputably handsome.”

His presidential campaign was not so durably constructed and imploded three months later in late April 1988. Trailing badly, Gore lasted just 14 days longer than the otherwise forgettable U.S. Sen. Paul Simon (D-IL). A distant fourth place finisher, Simon was nobody’s idea of “dark and indisputably handsome.”

Nonetheless, by the end of 1988 Simon and Gore were looking equally unpresidential and forgettable. But just four years later Gore was rescued from history and on his way to being “just one heartbeat away” from the highest office.

As the iconic account of Gore’s climate creed, Earth in the Balance was eclipsed by the 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth. The documentary narrated by Gore turbo-charged his post political career. It won an Academy Award for best documentary and an Emmy for best original song, and it helped Gore score a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

A lot of what we know of Gore’s climate beliefs over the past three decades comes from this excessively prized film.

Early in the performance, Gore quoted a warning from Mark Twain: “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

By that standard, Gore has been well-equipped to get into a lot of trouble.

Glacial Recount

By January 2020 Glacier National Park’s “say goodbye to the glaciers” signs had been sheepishly replaced with carefully vague warnings that the glaciers are indeed shrinking and will one day vanish.

***

“I’m Al Gore and I used to be the next president of the United States,” said Gore, early in An Inconvenient Truth, to adoring laughter and applause.

This was a reference to the 2000 presidential election when Democratic nominee Gore lost the state of Florida—and thus the White House—by 537 votes to Republican George W. Bush. As the votes were being counted on Election Night, Gore initially conceded the presidency to Bush.

But as Bush’s reported margin of victory in Florida narrowed, Gore called back to announce he had changed his mind. An incredulous Bush reportedly asked: “You mean to tell me, Mr. Vice President, you’re retracting your concession?”

During the ensuing weeks of recounts, it was revealed that Floridians using paper punch ballots didn’t always do a nifty job of fully punching through the paper to indicate their vote preference. This allegedly fouled up the ballot-reading scanners.

In their theory of the case, Gore partisans seemed to argue that Florida Democrats were disproportionately incompetent at punching holes in paper and that jurisdictions disproportionately run by Democratic voters were particularly incapable of counting votes correctly.

Gore’s joke at the start of An Inconvenient Truth demonstrates the degree to which he had not moved past this theory and the belief he would have won if we had just kept recounting Florida.

Today, it is common for the corporate media to refer to these delusions as “election denial,” but they leave out references to Gore.

Back in late 2000, Bush’s lead still held up after 36 days. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered Florida to cease its investigation into whether the state’s Democrats were less competent voters, and Gore criticized the High Court’s decision, but grudgingly accepted defeat a second time.

The same general joke about the vote count in the 2000 election is repeated a second time by Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, this time regarding the counting of glaciers at Glacier National Park.

“Within 15 years this will be the park formerly known as Glacier,” Gore tells the audience.

The keepers of the park even agreed at some point or other. They affixed signs telling tourists to say “Goodbye to Glaciers” and that “Computer models indicate the glaciers will all be gone by the year 2020.”

But Gore’s 15-year prophesy about the glaciers expired quietly in 2021. The 2021 visits to Glacier National Park exceeded each of the previous five years. The glaciers were still there.

“At the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850, there were about 80 glaciers in what would eventually become Glacier National Park,” proclaims the official park website today. “Based on aerial imagery from 2015 there were 26 named glaciers that met the size criteria of 0.1 km², nine fewer than in 1966.”

By January 2020 Glacier National Park’s “say goodbye to the glaciers” signs had been sheepishly replaced with carefully vague warnings that the glaciers are indeed shrinking and will one day vanish. The park website blames human impact for some of the loss, but of course not all. The name of the park is still the same and the official website warns prospective visitors to expect “about three million people visiting during each summer season.”

Glacier National Park’s website also says the “onset of a warming trend” at the end of that Little Ice Age caused the glaciers to begin their retreat and that their continued pace of decline is “due to both natural and human-caused climate change.”

The end of an ice age, little or otherwise, is an unpleasant development for glaciers. Somewhere between 7,000 and 32,000 years ago the bodies of water currently known as the Great Lakes were created from what were formerly known as glaciers.

The man who thinks he used to be the next president was wrong about the park that would be formerly known as Glacier. The decline of the glaciers at the eponymously named national park is inevitable, someday. But the alarmist catastrophe portrayed in An Inconvenient Truth was a convenient and alarmist deception.

Snow Job

Gore said there’d be no more snow on Kilimanjaro, the mountain still catches more annual snow than the people who live in the snowiest American cities will see over several years.

***

Gore’s prophecy regarding Kilimanjaro National Park in Tanzania was more precise, and just as wrong.

“Within the decade there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro,” he said to the audience in An Inconvenient Truth. This occurred moments before he makes his prediction for Glacier National Park.

Alluding poorly to the title of the Ernest Hemmingway short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Gore was trying to claim that Africa’s tallest mountain, with a peak that stands higher than 19,000 feet, would no longer have measurable snow cover on or before 2016.

As of November 2022, Snow-forecast.com, a webpage for skiers, reported that an average of 93 combined inches of snowfall (almost 8 feet) hits just the middle altitudes of Kilimanjaro during November and December. And 9 inches of combined snowfall is the average expected for the middle elevations for July and August, the lightest two-month period for snowfall on the middle part of the mountain.

The upper altitudes of Kilimanjaro supposedly get pummeled with an average of 171 inches (more than 14 feet) of snow during November and December. Another 127 inches (10 more feet) is expected during April and May. The expectation for September and October is 59 inches. According to Snow-forecast, every two-month period on Kilimanjaro’s higher elevations is expected to feature well over a foot of snowfall.

For perspective, Syracuse, New York, sometimes crowned America’s snowiest city, records average snowfall of 127.8 inches for the entire year.

More than 20,000 people annually climb to the summit of Kilimanjaro. Pull up a Google image search for “summit of Kilimanjaro” and the results will show a majority of the climbers celebrating with snow under their feet or piled nearby. And it stands to reason most don’t try the five-plus day trek to the top during the months when well over a foot of snow is expected each week.

Going on seven years past the day when Gore said there’d be no more snow on Kilimanjaro, the mountain still catches more annual snow than the people who live in the snowiest American cities will see over several years.

Hurricane Hyperbole

No comparable era of docile hurricanes appears in the NOAA records going back more than a century.

***

These failed prognostications about the future disasters of climate change were bad enough. But the hyperbole over hurricanes in An Inconvenient Truth was far worse.

“We have seen in the last couple of years, a lot of big hurricanes,” said Gore, in the 2006 film. “The summer of 2005 has been one for the books.”

In his history lecture on the hurricanes of 2005, Gore claimed the lesson to learn was that we had been ignoring “warnings that hurricanes would get stronger” because of human-inflicted climate change.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hosts a regularly updated webpage titled “Global Warming and Hurricanes: An Overview of Current Research Results.” The update as of October 2022 has this to say:

We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes.

The NOAA lists six named hurricanes making landfall on the continental United States in 2005, including four major ones.

What Gore knew (or should have known) but did not mention when he claimed there had been “a lot of big hurricanes” was that the four “major” storms of 2005 were all measured at Category 3 intensity when they made landfall. This includes the star of Gore’s presentation, the obviously devastating Hurricane Katrina that ravaged New Orleans in August 2005.

Category 3 is the lowest category that still qualifies as a “major” hurricane by the NOAA’s definition.

What neither Gore nor anyone else knew was the hurricane silence that would follow.

In 2006 not a single hurricane of any kind made landfall in the continental United States. And then, over the next 10 years through 2016, not a single major hurricane hit the USA. During seven of those years (2009–2015) just four total hurricanes of any kind made landfall, three of them Category 1 and one a Category 2.

No comparable era of docile hurricanes appears in the NOAA records going back more than a century. This period of unprecedented calm following immediately on the heels of Gore’s hurricane hyperbole really was—to borrow his analysis— “one for the books.”

If Gore proved anything at all, it was that Mother Nature might be real, with a wicked sense of humor, and she decided to spend 11 years making a mockery of his movie.

The deadly Hurricane Katrina obviously wasn’t funny at all. The real story needed no exaggeration, but that’s what it got from An Inconvenient Truth.

Gore’s description of the tragedy is heavy on hyperbole and emotional images:

Before it hit New Orleans, it went over warmer waters. As the water temperature increases, the wind velocity increases, and the moisture content increases. And you’ll see Hurricane Katrina form over Florida. And then as it comes into the Gulf over warm water it picks up energy and gets stronger and stronger and stronger. Look at that hurricane’s eye. And of course, the consequences were so horrendous; there are no words to describe it.

Katrina did indeed pick up speed as it left Florida, briefly ramping all the way up to a Category 5 while still over open water.

The Scary Seas

… the annual upward trend works out to 3.43 millimeters, a depth less than the thickness of two quarters stacked atop each other.

***

What isn’t so cinematic is the real story of sea level increases.

NASA has an online tracker of ocean levels that shows monthly changes back to January 1993. (Perhaps not coincidentally, this was Gore’s first month as vice president). NASA shows the sea rose about 6 millimeters during 1993. A visual representation of this depth would be four pennies stacked on top of each other.

While net sea change has been upward, and (according to NASA) happening “as a result of human-caused global warming,” the tracker also shows a few sharp declines. During one 10-month period from June 2010 through April 2011 the ocean dropped 9.1 millimeters. That equates to the thickness of a stack of six pennies.

NASA’s full 30 years of measurements since January 1993 adds up to a total net gain in sea level of 103 millimeters. That’s about the height of a coffee mug.

Averaged on a yearly basis, the annual upward trend works out to 3.43 millimeters, a depth less than the thickness of two quarters stacked atop each other. At that rate, total sea level increases over the next 100 years will equal 13 inches.

To put that in perspective, NASA reports the ocean rose about 8 inches over the previous 122 years, while nearly all of the world confronted much bigger problems.

If Gore had wished to honestly portray the relative degree of peril we face, he might have held up a ruler and warned us (accurately) that those living near sea level will need to continue developing coastal defenses sufficient to hold back just a little bit more seawater over the next century.

He could have reminded us that adaptation is feasible, has been going on for a long time, and is not very frightening. About one-third of the Netherlands sits below sea level, some of it 22 feet below. Sand dunes, dikes and pumps keep the ocean right where the Dutch want it. They’ll likely find and deploy even better solutions in the future.

However honest it may have been for Gore to portray this global challenge with tiny stacks of coins and nods to the brilliance of the Netherlands, that wasn’t going to win Oscars and other prizes.

So instead, he showed the consequences of a wildly hypothetical 20-foot increase in sea level. This was done with an alarmist video showing Manhattan, most of Florida, Beijing, Shanghai, and many other regions being submerged under the waves.

At the current rate of sea level increase, it will take 1,800 years for the ocean to go up another 20 feet.

Let’s say the annual average pace of sea rise quadruples, from the thickness of two quarters stacked atop each other to the thickness of eight quarters. That still puts the 20-foot total increase at 450 years away.

What would happen in 450 years: Obviously, a lot has been invented since 1573, when even the fiercest warships were still relying on weather-dependent wind power. (But hey, it was renewable!)

And Bible scholars estimate the Gospel of John was written roughly 1,900 years ago, so there is no easily recognizable technological marker to properly convey progress over the last 1,800 years.

If human ingenuity was sufficient to accidentally cause the ocean to rise somewhat more over the past mere century or so, then we have a lot of time left to develop better and cheaper ways to abate, adapt to, or even reverse the process.

In 2007 a British judge ruled there were nine important factual errors presented in An Inconvenient Truth that made it unsuitable for the nation’s schoolchildren unless accompanied by materials to correct the mistakes. The court ruled that the bit about sea level increases was “distinctly alarmist.”

How does Gore justify spinning such a hysterical hypothetical into one supposedly imminent catastrophe?

The 20-foot sea level increase was introduced with this preamble: “If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen . . .”

A recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that under even their worst-case warming scenario it will take until the end of the current century for ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica combined to add half a meter of sea level increase.

Compared to 20 feet, this worst-case scenario is a little more than 20 inches over the next 77 years. And under the least alarming estimate provided, the IPCC pegs the contribution to be just 1.6 inches through the end of the century.

It wouldn’t be box office gold to show Manhattan finding a way to carefully adapt to a few inches of sea level increase over the length of an average human lifetime.

So instead, Gore decided to explain what happens when 20 feet of extra water washes the world away:

After the horrible events of 9/11 we said, “Never again.” But this is what would happen to Manhattan. They can measure this precisely, just as the scientists could predict precisely how much water would breach the levees in New Orleans. The area where the World Trade Center Memorial is to be located would be under water. Is it possible that we should prepare against other threats besides terrorists? Maybe we should be concerned about other problems as well.

This was an unpleasantly revealing moment because of what it implied about the man’s priorities.

If Gore had collected another 600 votes in Florida during the 2000 election, he would have been president during the 9/11 attacks. And here he was, five years later, selling a mad Doomsday fantasy as a threat co-equal with a mass murder fresh in the minds of an audience who had lived through it.

In a wide field with many options, this may have been the most deplorable moment in An Inconvenient Truth.

The Bridge Fuel to Nowhere

From 2006, when Gore spoke those words, through 2021 total U.S. carbon emissions fell by 17.3 percent, back to roughly the American carbon emissions of 1988.

***

The end of the film features the former vice president in solutions mode, previewing the policy recommendations that have become his agenda ever since.

“Are we going to be left behind as the rest of the world moves forward?” Gore asked. “All of these nations have ratified Kyoto. There are only two advanced nations in the world that have not ratified Kyoto, and we are one of them. The other is Australia.”

He was speaking of the Kyoto Protocol climate pact that committed the signatories to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions.

But, once again, much as with the hurricanes, a very convenient thing happened in the years after An Inconvenient Truth.

From 2006, when Gore spoke those words, through 2021 total U.S. carbon emissions fell by 17.3 percent, back to roughly the American carbon emissions of 1988. On a per capita basis, the decline was 26.5 percent, a bigger drop than what Germany accomplished and close to the European Union’s 28 percent per capita decline.

Instead of “left behind,” we leaped ahead. But it wasn’t because we adopted “renewable energy,” “carbon capture sequestration,” or the other policy options Gore preached about in the film and continues to promote today.

It was the fossil fuel industry that got us there. Compared to coal, natural gas emits half the carbon per unit of energy produced. That added up to a big opportunity after 2006, when the United States became a natural gas superpower due to the hydraulic fracturing shale gas revolution. In the electricity sector, a massive switch from coal to natural gas ensued in the United States, and that slashed our carbon dioxide output.

By 2021, that trade of fuels alone had led to a net reduction in annual American carbon emissions of 680 million tons. For perspective, that is slightly more than the total 2021 carbon emissions of Germany.

So, since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, the growth of the American natural gas industry has reduced annual American carbon emissions by an amount that now exceeds the annual carbon output of the planet’s fourth largest economy.

Of course, Gore should have celebrated and encouraged this striking progress. Instead—to borrow his words—he was “left behind as the rest of the world moves forward.”

And it required truly ponderous political dancing for him to wind up on the wrong side.

Thirty years ago, in late November 1992, as the previously banal senator was about to become vice president, a New York Times report said this of the agenda the incoming Clinton-Gore administration was promoting:

The blueprint being put together by industry executives as well as staff members close to Mr. Clinton and Vice President-elect Al Gore conforms with the promises Mr. Clinton made during the campaign. He said he wanted to wean the nation from its reliance on coal and oil by converting to cleaner, less costly alternatives like natural gas . . .

With the benefit of hindsight, we know this part of the 1992 Clinton-Gore agenda was on the right track. In 1992 coal was the source fuel for 52.6 percent of U.S. electricity production, and natural gas was just 13.1 percent of the total. By 2021, the cleaner burning natural gas was up to 38.2 percent of the total, and coal had fallen to 21.8 percent.

Gore was still on the correct side of history when he ran for president in 2000. His campaign plan for the environment aimed to “promote expanded exploration for cleaner burning natural gas.”

Even as late as February 2009, just as the shale gas revolution was about to transform American energy, the U.S. economy, and dramatically slash carbon emissions, Gore was still willing to say this: “We should use natural gas for the 18-wheelers as a bridge fuel.”

But those statements ended as soon as the natural gas policy succeeded.

By the 2018 mid-term election Gore recommended a “Yes” vote on Colorado Proposition 112, which would have prohibited natural gas drilling wells from operating within 2,500 feet (nearly a half mile) of an occupied building.

Gore said a “yes” vote would “make climate justice history!” Wisely, 55 percent voted “no.”

By 2019, he had denounced natural gas as a “losing game” and “just as bad as coal.”

And in November 2022, with the Ukraine War scrambling the worldwide natural gas market and causing nations reliant on the fuel to consider developing alternative delivery infrastructure, Gore went to the COP27 annual climate policy talks in Egypt and told the Associated Press that natural gas was no longer a bridge fuel, but rather a “classic bridge to nowhere.”

Favoring Failure

So, according to the Nobel laureate, the planet’s weather is becoming dangerously crazy, and we must rely on this murderously unstable weather to provide our life-sustaining electricity.

***

Finding a way to favor failure has been a consistent theme.

In the years since An Inconvenient Truth Gore has consistently and specifically championed weather-dependent wind and solar energy as the options that should replace carbon-emitting fuels. He makes a specific pitch for both near the end of the film.

But as noted, the first hour the movie is filled with gory warnings that the notoriously unpredictable weather will become even wilder still. And today he still preaches the weather is out to kill us all.

“I think these extreme events that are getting steadily worse and more severe are really beginning to change minds,” he said to NBC News in July 2022. He made the same point to ABC News, adding that “the survival of our civilization is at stake.”

So, according to the Nobel laureate, the planet’s weather is becoming dangerously crazy, and we must rely on this murderously unstable weather to provide our life-sustaining electricity.

George Orwell analyzed this school of thought in his novel 1984:

DOUBLETHINK, means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of DOUBLETHINK he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated.” [Emphasis in original]

Understanding Al Gore’s energy agenda requires harnessing the power of doublethink.

But even James Hansen can’t do it.

The former NASA scientist is far from a critic of Gore’s overheated apocalyptic warnings about the fate of the planet. In the summer of 1988, following the implosion of his presidential campaign, Gore went back to work in the Senate and invited Hansen to testify in a now famous public hearing about global warming.

The hearing elevated the public profile of both men and the issue. After years of trying, Gore had finally put climate policy at the center of American political debates. Two decades later, Hansen remained an ally, warmly praising An Inconvenient Truth as a “a coherent account of a complex topic that Americans desperately need to understand.”

But in a 2011 analysis the much-celebrated climate alarmist wrote. “Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” Hansen concluded that renewables were “grossly inadequate for our energy needs now and in the foreseeable future.”

In 2015, The Guardian published an essay from Hansen and three other climate scientists titled “Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change.” Noting that France and Sweden were both able to “ramp up nuclear power to high levels in just 15–20 years,” Hansen and the others argued that a worldwide build rate of 115 new reactors annually was “technically achievable” and by 2050 would “entirely decarbonise the global electricity system.”

For Gore, failure was the option. In a 2020 TED Talk he dismissed nuclear energy as a “crushing disappointment.” This was not a new position for him. In a November 2000 statement released just days before his loss in the presidential election, Gore pandered to and thrilled anti-nuclear extremists with this statement: “I do not support any increased reliance on nuclear energy. Moreover, I have disagreed with those who would classify nuclear energy as clean or renewable.”

When Gore gave that TED Talk in 2020, nuclear energy was—by a healthy amount—the largest source of carbon-free energy consumed in the United States. As of 2021, nuclear kicked in 2,057 terawatt-hours of power, nearly equal to the combined output from wind, solar, and hydro-electric dams.

Nuclear energy’s dominance as America’s greatest source of carbon-free power was even more pronounced in November 2000, when Gore gave up on it, and has held true since at least the mid-1980s.

In March 2021, the U.S. Department of Energy declared nuclear the nation’s “largest source of clean power” and estimated that using nuclear rather than coal had removed the equivalent of 100 million carbon-emitting cars from the road. The Department of Energy also calculated that a “typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear facility” needed “a little more than 1 square mile to operate” yet did the work of 430 wind turbines or 3 million solar panels.

And with some . . . ahem . . . political leadership, the United States could have done far more with nuclear power and still could. In 2000, nuclear was—without even the “carbon free” qualifier—the largest source of power consumed in France, edging out even oil. By 2020, nuclear accounted for 36.6 percent of total energy consumed by the French, oil was a distant second at 30.5 percent, and nothing else was remotely close.

If these realities of nuclear power represent a “crushing disappointment” for carbon reduction and conservation of the natural environment, then it’s difficult to figure what could possibly ever make Gore happy.

The amazing technical marvel that is nuclear energy receives only a tangential mention in An Inconvenient Truth, when Gore announces that a nuclear-powered submarine took him on a trip underneath the North Pole. He doesn’t try to explain how this voyage could have been accomplished with a wind- or solar-powered boat. The effort might have won him another Oscar, though they would have needed a new category for “Best Comedy.”

Blood & Gore

When your bottom line depends upon portraying someone else as a grave threat to humanity, then it’s hard not to share that message with the next generation.

***

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett knows which way that wind blows. In 2014 he explained to Fortune magazine that he would “do anything that is basically covered by the law” to lower the taxes paid by his investment firm.

“For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms,” continued Buffett. “That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

Buffett is a self-aware investor in weather-dependent energy who is willing to admit to the perverse incentives that he is profiting from.

Not everyone is like that, according to a different quote used in An Inconvenient Truth.

“Upton Sinclair wrote this: ‘You can’t make somebody understand something if their salary depends upon them not understanding it,’” said Gore, near the end of the film

He was addressing those who don’t buy into his exaggerations and climate alarmism. But he could have been speaking of himself.

In 2004, Gore and a Goldman Sachs investment manager named David Blood teamed up to form Generation Investment Management. The Blood & Gore investment firm now promotes itself as a “pure-play sustainable investment manager” that has “played a pioneering role in the development of sustainable and environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing.”

ESG is the process whereby Big Money pushes big corporations into prioritizing lefty social and environmental policies. With that mission statement, the Blood & Gore firm could be renamed “WeWoke” to better explain what they’re up to.

Gore is the chairman, and Blood is the senior partner. As of June 2022, Generation Investment claimed $30 billion in customer assets under management.

Central to the Blood & Gore investment strategy is the notion that carbon-based fuels represent stranded assets—assets that will become worthless to their owners well before the currently presumed value has been depleted. In October 2013 the pair penned a Wall Street Journal opinion warning that the collapse of carbon fuel value would occur because of a combination of three pressure points: stricter government regulation, displacement by weather-dependent energy systems, and political campaigns that cause investors to flee from fossil fuels.

Although dressed up as wise investment predictions, these were really descriptions (some might say threats) of the policy agenda that Gore promotes and that his firm aims to profit from.

Gore is a reliable supporter of regulatory assaults on energy development. In July 2022, with the average retail price for a gallon of gasoline hovering near $5, he said President Joe Biden should refuse to open any additional federal land for oil and gas exploration.

Generation Investment is also a prominent investor in the weather-dependent energy firms. As noted in the Warren Buffett quote, this industry is implicitly funded by the taxpayers with billions of dollars in government tax credits and subsidies.

In November 2021, for example, Octopus Energy announced that it had inked a $600 million partnership with Generation Investment Management. Octopus claimed to be “Europe’s largest investor in solar energy, managing $4.5bn of renewable energy assets across the continent.” In a news release, the Octopus CEO praised Gore’s movies as the inspiration for the Octopus growth strategy. In return, Gore said Octopus was a “living example of the kind of company that Generation was founded to invest in.”

And if you have enough loot to call Gore in for a speech, then he’s likely to promote disinvestment from the carbon-based energy firms, an outcome favorable to the Blood & Gore investment strategy. In a 2019 commencement address to his alma mater, Harvard University (which definitely has the loot), Gore asked: “Why would Harvard University continue to support with its finances an industry like this that is in the process of threatening the future of humanity?” In a December 2021 visit to Vanderbilt University, he said he endorsed “in no uncertain terms” a proposal that the school dump its investment holdings in fossil fuel energy firms.

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: When your bottom line depends upon portraying someone else as a grave threat to humanity, then it’s hard not to share that message with the next generation.

Perhaps that is the meaning behind the “Generation Investment Management” name? At the least, that’s more marketable than “Blood & Gore” might have been.

It Could Have Happened Here

Energiewende reached peak stupid in October 2022 when one of the once-celebrated wind turbine facilities was partly dismantled so Germany could make expanded use of a century-old coal mine.

***

The entirety of three current generations were either not yet born or too young to vote in the 1992 presidential election: Millennials, Generation Z, and (apparently what we’re being told to refer to as) Generation Alpha.

Similarly, the oldest of GenX (born 1965–1981) were just 27 that year, and the youngest weren’t yet in middle school.

So, most of today’s America has either come of age or lived their entire lives since 1993. They have experienced Al Gore mostly in the roles preferred by today’s corporate media: vice president, “man who used to be the next President of the United States,” venerated Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Oscar-awarded filmmaker, best-selling author, and environmentalist hero.

As argued to this point, overwhelming evidence indicates that he remains the mediocre, yet personally ambitious federal politician who was forced into a quick and quiet exit from the 1988 presidential race. In the words of former hockey coach Don Cherry, finding evidence of that man today “ain’t rocket surgery.”

But outside of his days as understudy in the scandal-seeking Clinton administration, the conventional media hasn’t broken a sweat to talk about that Al Gore. Their collective credulity has helped transform him from easily forgettable to a very wealthy and influential figure.

That influence matters. Gore and others of his stature are major drivers of bad energy policy decisions in America and across the world. Three billion people worldwide still live in what energy analysts refer to as “energy poverty”— defined as little to no access to modern electricity and fuel for heating and cooking meals. More of them will remain in the cold, in the dark, and poor because of the media’s sins of omission regarding what Gore and those like him are selling.

Even the wealthy could get left in the cold following Gore’s advice. To find an example of where it may lead America, look to Germany, the world’s fourth largest economy and third-largest wealthy industrial economy behind Japan. (China, though the planet’s second largest economy, still had a GDP per capita in 2021 that lagged behind nations such as Romania and Iran).

In 2000, Germany launched Energiewende—or “energy transition”—a radical plot to kick the major industrial giant off fossil fuels and onto “renewable” energy. Over the next 20 years, they provided massive subsidies to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to juice the buildout of wind turbines, solar panels, and biogas from fermenting crops. It was everything Al Gore could have asked for, with the added extra-Gore-y decision in 2011 to go at it by phasing out Germany’s zero-carbon nuclear power stations.

A hint of how smart this all was: Thunder Bay, Ontario, way up on the north shore of Lake Superior, has more average annual hours of sunlight than every major city in Germany.

In September 2013, the German newsweekly Der Speigel ran a progress report titled “How Electricity Became a Luxury Good.” The phrase “energy poverty” was already being used to describe the plight of some of Germany’s citizens. “If the government sticks to its plans,” said the magazine, “the price of electricity will literally explode in the coming years.”

They did, and it did. By 2019 German households were paying 55 percent more for electricity than the French (who were also emitting far less carbon, due to their extensive use of nuclear energy) and 162 percent more than Americans.

A 2019 Der Speigel report on the situation was titled “German Failure on the Road to a Renewable Future” and characterized Energiewende as a “massive failure.” Driving the bad policy dagger in deeper, it said “German CO2 emissions have only slightly decreased this decade,” while in the United States, because of the switch from coal to natural gas for electricity generation, “the country’s CO2 emissions are trending in the right direction.”

By August 2022 the Russian attack on Ukraine was forcing an energy-desperate Germany to scramble for new natural gas supplies. The German chancellor begged Canada for access to its rich bounty . . . and got turned down. In November, Germany landed a natural gas deal with Qatar, during the same month that Germany’s World Cup soccer team was in Qatar trying to shame that same nation over its odious human rights record.

Before the Qatari deal, Energiewende reached peak stupid in October 2022 when one of the once-celebrated wind turbine facilities was partly dismantled so Germany could make expanded use of a century-old coal mine.

It’s far from unfair to draw a direct line from these fiascos to Al Gore. In a very plausible alternative universe, 300 Floridians might have changed their mind on Election Day 2000 and switched their vote to Gore. By April 2008, he may have been in the second of two terms in the White House.

Back in the world as it was, Gore founded and was chairman of the Climate Reality Project, a worldwide advocacy nonprofit promoting the feckless energy and climate policies he may have implemented as president.

In April 2018, promoting a seminar scheduled for Germany, Gore heaped effusive praise on Energiewende: “As a global leader on climate action, Germany has demonstrated that investment in renewable energy and technology can help usher in a successful transition toward a clean energy economy without compromising economic strength.” He added, “I look forward to meeting and hearing from the inspiring climate activists in Germany who are helping drive climate action that will continue to accelerate the global shift away from fossil fuels.”

Following the quote from Gore, the Climate Reality Project news release added this:

Germany has taken initiative to implement a far-reaching energy transition strategy to help move the country away from coal . . . climate action policies like these have influenced other countries in Central and Eastern Europe to reexamine their own.

According to Our World in Data calculations, German CO₂ emissions per capita declined by 7.1 percent from 2010 (the year Energiewende was enacted) through 2017 (just before Gore’s praise for Germany in early 2018).

The decline in the United States over the same period was 13.5 percent.

Stepping back from that snapshot, consider the bigger picture from 2000, the year Gore became “the man who used to be the next President of the United States,” through 2021, the most recent year measured by Our World in Data.

Over that span, American CO₂ emissions per capita fell 30.2 percent. In Germany, the nation Gore has praised as the shining policy example for how to save the planet, the cumulative decline over the same period was 28.4 percent.

The United States achieved better results, with far lower electricity prices and a booming natural gas revolution. We did it without energy poverty, without embarrassingly begging Canada to ship us some natural gas, and without the lifeblood of our economy being held hostage by Vladimir Putin.

We did it all without following Al Gore and his highly influential, awful ideas. It was a near miss, and it’s still a mistaken path he’s trying to send us down.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/al-gores-30-plus-years-of-climate-errors/